No Dominion: The Lonely, Dangerous Fight Against Christian Supremacists Inside the Armed Forces

In his fight against British imperialism, Mahatma Gandhi described the life cycle of successful civil disobedience: "First
they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you
win." Mikey Weinstein, the 55-year-old founder of the Albuquerque, New
Mexico-based Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), likes to
quote it, knowing full well he's crossed the line into a bloody-knuckle
brawl. Over the past year, Weinstein and his organization have recorded a
tremendous string of victories in the fight against Christian
supremacists inside the armed forces.

In January, the MRFF broke the story on the Pentagon's Jesus Rifles, where rifle scopes used in Afghanistan and Iraq were
embossed with New Testament verses. In April, he got the military to rescind its
invitation to the Reverend Franklin Graham to speak at May's
National Prayer Day because of Islamophobic remarks. Most shockingly,
MRFF received its second nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize in late
October. These high-profile victories have earned him the enmity of the
hardcore Christian Right and the mentally unstable. And the crazies are
getting crazier. Weinstein and his family are bombarded with hate mail,
from the grammatically incorrect and easy to dismiss - "I hope all your
kids turn out gay as hell, take it in the ass, and get aids and die!!!!"
- to the kind of threats that immediately make you leap out of your
chair and double-check that the doors and windows are locked. (MRFF has
referred multiple death threats on Mikey, his family, and MRFF employees
to the FBI.)

Unlike Gandhi, Mikey's no pacifist. Aggression rises up in his voice like a white shark's fin breaks the waves. In a recent
conversation, Mikey bragged how a punk wouldn't shut up in a movie. When
a confrontation ensued and the man took a wild swing, Mikey put him
down. None of this is surprising. Weinstein boxed during his Air Force
days, his face marked by a strong jawline sitting below a bald head on
top of a stocky body - a cross between Rocky Marciano and Butter Bean.
Simply put: Mikey Weinstein can be a brute and a zealot. He knows this
and admits it freely. But he believes it's the only position a
reasonable person can take when confronted with a faction dedicated to
mutating the U.S. military into "a weaponized Gospel of Jesus Christ."

But for all of his rhetorical excesses and bravado, Weinstein's fight is simple and correct. The United States military
cannot favor one religious sect over another, staying true to the
Constitution's establishment clause that service members pledge to
defend. More pragmatically, the military cannot favor one religious sect
over another because it's destructive of good order and discipline,
creating divisions between service members when they must rely on the
guy next to them to survive in a firefight. Yet inside the U.S.
military a small, determined, and fanatical clique wants to abuse its
power and prosetlyze to service members below them in the chain of
command. Through this captive market, they can inject their peculiar
ideology into the most powerful institution on earth. As Weinstein likes
to say, this isn't just a civil rights issue, it's a national security
threat of the gravest magnitude. The description sounds hyberbolic, but
according to Weinstein there's a pervasive Christian supremacist milieu
inside the U.S. military that's a danger not only to constitutional
order, but to the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. What's ironic
about Mikey's fight is that he never thought about becoming "a civil
rights activist." He discovered his calling by rising up like a grizzly
bear for his son.

When I was in the US Army my career was destroyed by my own chain of command simply for not being Christian. It goes much further than this article expounds in that soldiers are persecuted and abused on a daily basis.

When it was discovered that I was not a Christian I was made to carry a 40lb chunk of concrete along with my other gear, the concrete lashed to my wrist. I had to name it, bathe with it, sleep with it. As an infantryman it crippled my ability to do my job and the added weight threw out an already bad knee. My higher ups claimed that it was to teach me "the gravity of the situation."

I'm not alone in having been treated poorly. Other atheists, pagans, and even Jews have complained to me about how they were treated in the service once they learned of how I had been treated. I hope Mikey's fight makes some headway.